They’ve also updated their slider control to be compatible with the upcoming jQuery UI 1.6 release and new options have been added for choosing the label and tooltip text source, better integration with native UI Slider options, and dynamic width adjustments based on the parent container.

The purpose of this plugin is to allow for the jQuery UI Slider plugin to be generated using progressive enhancement. The plugin scrapes the data from a select element and generates a jQuery UI Slider in its place, acting as a proxy to the select element (regardless of whether it is still visible, or hidden from the user). This means you can use the jQuery Slider plugin alongside other input elements in a form and submit or serialize the form as if the slider is not even there. This also allows the slider to work with our without javascript since the select element can be used if the slider is unavailable.

ThemeRoller-ready

The interesting part of these two controls is that they’re now taking advantage of the new jQuery UI CSS Framework which makes them immediately ThemeRoller-ready. This allows for easy skinning of both controls via the ThemeRoller application.

@BenGerrison
I insanely agree, the plugin is probably great and all that, and I hope pople don’t think I’m jumpin on the plugn, but jQuery is pretty “middle of the road” these days and Ajaxian is supposed to be about *new* and *indie* stuff…
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I know you guys all work in the same company these days (Mozilla) but seriously there are almost three times as many articles about jQuery as there are about JSON. And all though jQuery is *big* it’s not anywhere *close* to JSON…!
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ScriptAculous is about the same size as jQuery and have less then 25% the amount of exposure. Plus it’s like two years older.
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jQuery has 138 articles, W3C has *8*, Web20 24, XmlHttpRequest 41. Even *Yahoo* has less articles…
“Standards” has less then 1/3…
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PS!
These figures are taken from your tag counts…
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At the moment the only reason why I haven’t changed Ajaxian out with something else to get news about my passion (like about 80% of your readers have done the last 2 years) is because I haven’t found anything to replace it with…

I got nothing against jQuery, in fact, I’m playing around with it now and kinda like it. Though there are quite a few reasons why I would choose for a more verbose framework, mainreason being, once you start using jQuery, it’s really hard to factor it out if need be.
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What I also see, is that jQuery assimilates new ideas, whilst generally being a good for the end user, it kinda disheartens people from publishing their own new ideas and thoughts, you just know jQuery will have a better solution within weeks and everyone will basically dis the original code and inventor since jQuery rocks…
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I also remember this tiny dispute between JD (peppy) and JR about credits. Yet I still cannot find the credits to for example Douglas Crockford in jQuery, who surely paved the way for DOM Query scripts. If you assimilate ideas from other people without giving them credits, then don’t be a hypocrit about credits.
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jQuery is also going commercial, with the recent contract with microsoft, they actually stand to gain a lot by plugging jQuery as much as they can. No problemo, but for Ajaxian to be indy, some restrictions should be put in place.
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All that said, I do still think jQuery as a framework, is one of the best out there, albeit rather obtrusive to your JS management. I personally prefer a more mix and match kind of framework, like Sizzle ;) but for pick up and go… jQuery rocks…

I’ve gotten to the point where I just check this site once every couple of weeks (via Google Reader). There’s still the occasional article on here that’s not plugin spam :) Seriously, how many people come to this site to keep up to date with the endless barrage of version updates, previews, plugins, etc, from all the javascript libraries?

Yeah, so I’m being overly harsh. I guess I wouldn’t be complaining if there were lots of ext related articles — I’m a total ext fan boy.

By using the pull-down menu, you can screw up the two-handled slider demo by setting the left handle far to the right of the right one. The mouse and keyboard controls don’t let you do it, but the pull-down does.
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It was the first thing I tested to see how robust it was. Mighty disappointed.

why all the hate? geez.
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jquery is a great framework from which to build on top of. and its ease of use and programming style is what has me using it. not to mention that it’s very fast at what it does.
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don’t get me wrong, i also use Ext, which is more a standard programming type of library and i love it as well.

@nosredna: that’s actually a reported bug in jQuery UI’s slider plugin. Programatically setting the values doesn’t trigger the handle value validation script. The bug is marked to be fixed in the tracker for 1.6 final I think.
That aside, the common use of this will be setting the selects to display none once the slider is there. So at least it isn’t a major issue in the meantime.

Scott, it’s just when the very first thing I try to do breaks it, I’m thinking, jeez, what else doesn’t work? How much time am I going to have to spend fixing the code.
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It’s probably just that one bug, but it’s such an obvious thing, I wonder about the code inside.

[Advocacy]
1. Even if jQuery is going commercial, why is that bad?
2. Dojo has 208 articles about it, whereas jQuery has 131.
[/Advocacy]

By the way, I also have the feeling that there are too many articles about jQuery in the past months, but Ajaxian is still interesting. Also, some jQuery articles aren’t of interest only to jQuery users (to which I don’t belong) but to JavaScript developers in general and even to other JS library developers (they see what they have to offer to remain competitive).

@ajaxery,
There is no hate… jQuery is a great framework, no one is dissing that (at least I aint).
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@SteveFDotNet,http://blog.jquery.com/2008/09/28/jquery-microsoft-nokia/
The framework itself might not be commercial, but it’s extremely unlikely there are no deals involved. Hey everyone is allowed to earn a buck or two, but this jquery plugging becomes shameless free advertising. If thats the case, I wanna see a “sponsored by jQuery” logo on Ajaxian. =P
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@LeaVerou,
1.) Not a bad thing at all, it ensures stability and reliability in the jQuery framework. But then you have to consider if a post about jQuery is either news or advertising.
2.) Dojo is considerably older then jQuery and I would call Dojo pioneers whereas jQuery is more refinement of existing ideas, the extent of chaining JR introduced however, was genious.

@BenGerrissen:
1. To advertise something commercial you must profit from it, either directly or indirectly. Otherwise it’s not advertising but either news or plain …exitement about the product. Excuse my ignorance but how exactly would Ray Bango profit from advertising jQuery? I know he works at Mozilla, but does this suffice?

2. I was mostly responding to ThomasHansen, who compared tag counts.

As I said, I agree with you, there is a clear inclination towards jQuery, I just think you (and the others who complained) are a bit exaggerating. If I was a random visitor who only read this article and its comments, I would assume that >50% of the articles are about jQuery! :P

@LeaVerou,
1.) Dunno if Ray Bango is an author or an editor, the latter would imply someone else supplies the articles, which is usually the case.
2.) I havent really complained now have I? =P I’ve only elaborated my question further, but it’s still unawnsered.
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I do feel peeps need to point these things out, even if it’s a suspicion, eventhough it might hit a huge defensive wall. Worst case scenario for jQuery lovers, is a “sponsored by jQuery” logo on ajaxian =P

@Ben & LeaVerou: To be clear, I’m a member of the jQuery team & that’s listed in my Ajaxian profile found here (http://ajaxian.com/about-us). Some would argue (and they have) that I would be biased towards reporting news primarily related to the project. The fact is that I spend more time avoiding any postings about jQuery and reporting about other tools specifically to avoid these perceptions. In the last few months, I’ve posted rarely due to other priorities so if jQuery posts have shown up, it’s due to other Ajaxian authors and editors, not me. I’ve only recently started writing again.

The majority of my posts have been about other frameworks or JS development topics and I’ve actively pursued developers from Dojo, Prototype, MooTools and others to provide me with material to write about. You can ask Dylan Schiemann of Dojo or Tom Ochhino of MooTools for confirmation. There are also some projects that I choose to not to write about simply because of my personal feelings towards the projects or individuals associated to it. I’d rather allow someone a bit more objective to cover those efforts.

I don’t have a profit motivation since, as was mentioned, I work for Mozilla. I don’t use jQuery at work which reinforces the fact that I don’t have a profit motivation. I do want, though, for the jQuery project to continue to grow and succeed.

@Ben: You mentioned that jQuery is going commercial. Just to be clear, the project has no contract with Microsoft or anyone else. It’s free software licensed under MIT & GPL. The fact that a commercial entity decided to package it or use it does not mean that the project is now a commercial endeavor. If that were the case, every library would be in the same boat.

With regards to the number of jQuery posts, I think this can be attributed to the high visibility and increased adoption of the library. A *lot* of people are writing jQuery-related topics so there’s a huge amount of content available to report on. I do agree that we should spread the coverage more and Dion’s recent large posting re: MooTools is a start to that. Aaron of MooTools has recently started producing some good content and we’re committed to covering that and more. And even today the coverage was very even keeled and I think the topics were awesome.

I’d suggest that you, the readers, help us by contributing topics to Ajaxian. The contribution email is located in the right panel.

Comment by Rey Bango — January 19, 2009

@ThomasHansen: “Just because it’s MIT doesn’t mean there are no commercial interests in it…”
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Correct but it also doesn’t mean that the jQuery project signed any contract with Microsoft or anyone else. Every lib I know has commercial users of some sort but that doesn’t mean that they’ve now become a commercially-backed project.

Comment by Rey Bango — January 19, 2009

@LeaVerou
“To advertise something commercial you must profit from it”
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Rey actually at least previously, I think still actually works for jQuery LLC and has been – at least previously their “Main Platform Evangelizer” (he’s had a couple of pit-stops at Ext LLC so I’m not really sure who pays his salary these days though…)
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John once said in a video (it’s at Google TechTalks still) that “hiring Rey as their evangelizer was a genius thing to do and contributed a lot to their ‘Alexa graph'”…
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Note I don’t think it’s wrong to occasionally plug jQuery, as I don’t think it’s wrong to plug any Ajax Framework here at Ajaxian. Though to keep the numbers in perspectives. ASP.NET AJAX in the first like 6 months or something after the 1.0 release a couple of years ago had almost a *million* downloads *per-month* – at least according to MSFT themselves. And sure ASP.NET AJAX might not be the “greatest technical achievement” from Redmond. But the sheer numbers of downloads, at least in the beginning should probably justify that it at least gets its own *TAG*…!
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It has been quite funny to view the conceptual changes at the Ajaxian team though. When I started reading stuff here a couple of years ago it was extremely “indie”. Then they did lots of Prototype/ScriptAculous articles. Then it turned “pragmatic” with lots of “flex works” articles. Then it did a *LOT* of ExtJS articles. When Ext did the GPL thing though the focus went on to jQuery…
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And the really scary thing is that the framework adoption has more or less evolved directly proportional to whatever Ajaxian has at any point in time been writing mostly about…
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I just pray to #%@£ God that they don’t start pouring out Silverlight articles…!
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To put things in context I know for a fact that *one-comment* here at an article at Ajaxian is going to give my website about 20-100 hits the first 24 hours. In the beginning when I started reading Ajaxian an article here would give you like 1500 visitors. That’s about 5 times as much as an article at the landing page at codeproject.com – which is supposedly “the largest programming related websites in the world” – (according to themselves with more then 8 million visitors per year)
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When my former startup had an article here at Ajaxian.com featuring anchor texts like “Ajax TreeView”, “Ajax TabControl”, “Ajax Accordion” etc – we mostly VACUUM CLEANED those keywords at the Google SERP…!
That company *still* “owns” those keywords…!
And they bring them about 300 hits from Google *per day*…!
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Though I am not sure they have the same amount of “pull” they once had previously. So maybe it’s not that much to fear anymore…
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A couple of hundred men have repeatedly through History said things like; “With great power comes great responsibility”…
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But times are changing, Ajaxian has lost like 80% of their pagehits the last year(s) – at least according to Alexa – and doesn’t come anywhere near the pull they used to have…
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Which is a shame, because with the power Ajaxian at least used to have, they could really have done something great and contributed much more in a positive way to the world… :(
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Unfortunately they to a large extend wasted their “15 minutes” on plugging bad ideas for the wrong reasons… :(

I think your hit piece on Rey is way out of line, and basically FUD. If you’ve ever met Rey (which I have), you’d know that he’s a solid upstanding guy that is just out to do the right thing.

I think we’re seriously losing sight of the point of doing open source software here, which is to create great stuff that we can use together, rather than bicker and fight on Ajaxian.

Your comments about Rey and where he works seemed particularly uncalled for coming from you. Given your public issues with your previous company, you of all people should know better than to assume something that you likely know nothing about.

From my experience with Dojo and Ajaxian and SitePen, the Ajaxians report the news. How do they find out about the news? People tell them. They follow RSS feeds, Twitter feeds, delicious feeds, talk to people, get emails, etc. If you have something interesting going on, they will find out about it and write a short piece about it.

jQuery is not a corp., just as Dojo is not a corp. They are non-profit, open source projects that do the world a lot of good. Do companies make money by using jQuery and Dojo? Of course.

John’s famous comment about “hiring Rey” was a joke: Rey volunteered. Perhaps something was lost in translation, but it’s called humor, combined with recognition of the great work Rey has done in helping people learn about jQuery.

The jQuery team and community have done a great job and are proud of the work they are doing. What’s wrong with that, and why are you so full of hate? Rey fully discloses his role with jQuery when he posts about jQuery. I hardly see anything nefarious? To say that jQuery has not had a number of interesting announcements lately is ignoring the work they have done. Asking Ajaxian to ignore passing along that news is silly.

Obviously I’m proud of the work the Dojo community has done as well, but I don’t need to put jQuery down in order to make people feel good about Dojo as I believe the success of our project can stand on the merits of our work. I’m wondering why you feel the need to repeatedly do the same thing on Ajaxian about anything that’s not the work you have done?

@Rey
I am sorry if I spread false information, that is of course not my intention, what was false…?
I realize that according to your comment you don’t “work” for jQuery, I am sorry for claiming that if it’s false…
Though a lot of the problem between e.g. Ext and John Resig has been due to that Rey (you) were “headhunted” by Ext LLC and John has been quoted and publicly spoken about it as something he’s angry an disappointed about. So if you were not “working” for jQuery, why was John so disappointed about that Ext LLC wanted to give you *salary*. It kind of made sense for a *lot* of reasons thinking that you were “hired” and had your salary by jQuery some way or another…
Maybe you should clarify this yourself somehow, because there *is* lot of confusion about this point…?
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@Dylan
I don’t see the hate…?
I claim that jQuery have a lot of posts, which I (and many others) think is a problem. And I often speak about Managed Ajax, yes. Though more often from a conceptual viewpoint then about specific implementations about it, or…?

@Rey, thanks for the awnser, I wont question the integrity of developers since they’re usually fighting their own marketers and salesguys already. =P
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I do believe these kind of questions and discussions matter though, developers worldwide steer clear from these topics, so it can prevent them from posting their inovations on Ajaxian as they believe it’s pointless anyways. So break down the walls and chat about it I say.
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Indeed, if other frameworks want more highlighting, they really need to post and if jQuery seems a too daunting opponent, take another route.
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As I stated before, I like plugin frameworks like Sizzle or Peppy more then jQuery. Specialist tools to mix and match per project, there’s still a huge opportunity out there for developers to get their specialist libraries out and perhaps an umbrella organisation to force standards and compatibilities.
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keep posting ;)

@Dylan: Thank you for your support. :)
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@Ben: Yep I agree which is why I replied and did my best to explain things. I hope that helped clear up some things.

Comment by Rey Bango — January 20, 2009

@ThomasHansen:
The only thing that I will clarify is that I’ve always been a volunteer for the jQuery project, NEVER receiving any form of compensation for my *volunteer* work. I do it as a “labor of love”. As Dylan pointed out to you, I’ve been very forthcoming about that. If the lead for the Dojo project is confirming as much, don’t you think it’s about time that you accepted that fact?
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John’s feelings or statements about Ext are his to explain but they have nothing to do with any form of compensation from the jQuery project. My status is clearly described above *AND* reaffirmed by Dylan.
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I trust that my status with the jQuery project is perfectly clear now & that the false statements that you’ve continued to spread will stop.

Comment by Rey Bango — January 20, 2009

@BenGerrissen: Even if a “sponsored by jQuery” logo was put at the header of Ajaxian, I wouldn’t mind if the quality of the articles remained the same and weren’t more about jQuery than they should. I consider going commercial a good thing, and I can’t understand why Ray Bango is trying to explain in so many comments that he doesn’t profit from jQuery. Ok, he doesn’t, but even if he did, so what? Would that somehow imply that jQuery is of less quality? Of course not. For instance YUI is and always has been privately funded and it’s still a great library.
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@ThomasHansen: Why are you so interested in where Rey Bango gets his salary from? I just don’t get it.
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@SteveFDotNet: That was so mean! Would you like it if you had spent so much time writing a framework and someone told you what you just told to ThomasHansen? You could have said the same thing politely and without hurting anyone’s feelings. Thumbs down.
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@Rey Bango: You don’t need to reply to me as well. I never believed that your writing about jQuery had anything to do with financial motives. I also never implied that Ajaxian’s inclination towards jQuery is caused by your articles. I just said that in general I also feel that Ajaxian is a bit more inclined towards jQuery than other libraries but it’s still an interesting site.
That has little to do with you or this particular article. I have a strong appreciation about most popular libraries (even though I use none, I am in the process of writing my own the past few months, I hope to be able to publicly release it sometime in Q2 2009) and I would never be a hater (or anything close to one) for any of them. I also don’t like to blame particular people that easily. I hope this clears any confusion about my comments. :-)

@LeaVerou
Wise words… :)
Finally a “grown up” ;)
(Before anyone “jumps” on that comment the “none-grown-ups” also happens to include *me*)
@Rey
Apologizes
@Steve
Ra-Ajax had it’s 1.0 release 2nd of January 2009 and wasn’t publicly available (in alpha) before late August 2008, also we’re mostly using http://stacked.ra-ajax.org for support, in fact I don’t think the forums at http://ra-ajax.org even works to be honest…

I agree very much with Ben and Tom. Without gloating too much, I’ve always been way ahead of the curve, in fact I had the first set of web frameworks. I had been out of web development for almost 5 years when I first heard about scriptalicious, Dojo, Mootools, and ofcourse Jquery.

What always bothered me was how John Resign would always put some license on obvious code. I mean there’s a list of functionality, already implemented in a billion other languages and John always tries to be the first to do it in Javascript then put a license on it. That’s the main reason I decided to build my own framework. I had been using it for about a year before I even considered extending native dom elements. Right now, I’m using Peppy as my selector engine and would love to try out sizzle some time in the future. I heard J.Resig talking about ‘working with’ prototype or some other framework to incooperate sizzle, and I was thinking, ‘what the ***?’ It took me about 1 day to get peppy working with my framework, and its still completely functional without it. I understand this capitalist thing but seriously JQuery is going the route of Google. Too big for it’s own good.